When to use Server Side Includes?

Question

In apache's doc about SSI it says that: "SSI is a great way to add small pieces of information, such as the current time. But if a majority of your page is being generated at the time that it is served, you need to look for some other solution." That's alright but is somewhat unclear on some matters. For example does it mean that using SSI for small pieces of information is better than the CGI alternatives? Faster, maybe? How is SSI useful if anything can be done with CGI? etc.

Answer 1

The SSI syntax is very simple, and it's built into apache, so it is probably faster than anything that's not an apache module, and WAY faster and less resource intensive than CGI (the spawn-an-arbitrary-executable-process-for-each-request kind that hardly anyone uses nowadays).